Did any of you actually read the whole interview?
http://blog.wired.com/games/2007/05/interview_noas_.html#more
WN: In five years, where do you see the Wii? In the US.
GH: Certainly I think that as we get through this entire lifecycle, and already people are starting to guess, "who's going to win the lifecycle," two things are going to happen. First of all, I'm not sure it's going to be a typical lifecycle. In the past, we've always had five- to six-year lifecycles which were sort of forced by someone jumping ahead and using a new piece of technology. And we're finding out now that the appeal of faster processors and better graphics is really sort of reaching a diminishing point. There's a price point and there's the quality that's holding the PlayStation 3 back. They're selling so many PlayStation 2s because people are saying, "You know what? The graphics are pretty good, the price is good, and the library is good." So we have a great expectation that this lifecycle's actually going to last more than five years.
We also have a belief that we can be, of this lifecycle, 40-45% of the hardware that's being sold. And that would be a phenomenal increase for us over the GameCube era. But on the other hand, we could get over 50%. And a lot of that depends on what our competitors do. If they only focus on the Grand Theft Autos and the Halos and things of that nature, they're focusing on a very tiny part of the market. The overall market is growing so dramatically that they're going to miss out on the opportunities that we're seeing in the expanded audience.
WN: In that sense, what do you think that Sony or Microsoft could do to make Nintendo less confident in its position? What announcements could they make that would make you say, "They're really gunning after us right now."
GH: So far, they haven't spent a lot of time focused on us. Now that we're having some success, they probably will. We can already see some of the things that they've tried. For last year's E3, at the last minute, Sony rushed out their Sixaxis controller as an effort to respond to the Wii remote. We saw Microsoft roll out Viva Piñata as their killer app for the Pokémon set. And neither of those worked really well. Part of it is, I think it's not in their DNA. They're really good at reaching a certain customer, and have a real difficulty understanding how we succeed with the customers that we have.
Microsoft caters to the hardcore. It's not exactly a secret... GTA and Halo don't have the world-wide appeal of Tetris. That's no secret either. The PS2 is still selling very well despite the fact that there are consoles out there that are "better". No one was taking Nintendo seriously until after E3. The Wii is bringing in old gamers and new gamers, and Nintendo is reaping the benefits. He may be a little optimistic about hardware sales, but other than that, how is what he's saying incorrect?
Log in to comment